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THE DOUGHBOY'S 
RELIGION 



THE DOUGHBOY'S 

RELIGION and Other 

Aspects of Our Day 

BY 
BEN B. LINDSEY 

AND 

HARVEY O'HIGGINS 



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 



Yy 






m 16 1329 



The I>oughboy's Reugion 



Copyright, ipaoi by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published January, 1920 

M-T 



©CI,A559409 



I 



COT^TENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction vii 

The doughboy's religion 1 

The junker faith 21 

Horses' rights for women 52 

A LEAGUE of understanding 74 



INTRODUCTION 

There is a sort of fame that comes of 
much advertising and a name continually in 
the public prints — a sort of overpowering 
conspicuity that convinces without creden- 
tials and gets itself accepted without proof. 
There is another sort of fame that travels 
so quietly it seems to go by underground and 
reaches a million people as if in silence, like 
one of those famous old books that are 
printed in all the languages of civilized man 
without advertisement and read with pri- 
vate dehght. Judge Lindsey's fame is of 
this latter kind. 

He is known throughout the whole mod- 
ern world for his work in the Juvenile Court 
of Denver. His laws and his court-pro- 
cedure have been made the model for Acts 
of Parliament in Great Britain. He is as 
much an authority in France and Germany 
and Austria and Italy. When the envoys 
of the Kerensky government came to Amer- 



INTRODUCTION 

ica, they brought a message of fraternal 
thanks to him from the new Russian repub- 
lic. Delegates from Japan have sat in his 
court to study his methods and take his 
lessons home to their people. His name is 
one of the great American names among the 
foreign nations, and his work is one of the 
great American achievements in social re- 
form and the relief of the unfortunate. 

In this country he is even better known 
for his support of that "new freedom" 
which President Wilson celebrates. Judge 
Lindsey's efforts on behalf of the children 
in Colorado brought him first into conflict 
with employers who were exploiting chil- 
dren in industry, and with organized vice 
that was corrupting children in dives and 
gambling-hells. With the aid of woman 
suffrage in Denver, he won that fight. He 
went on to give battle to the larger forces of 
corruption in city and state. He sought to 
obtain playgrounds for children by forcing 
the street railways and other public utilities 
of Denver to pay their proper taxes, sought 
to protect the children of the poor by ob- 
taining laws to protect their parents from 
unjust and oppressive employers, sought to 
obtain those laws by breaking the power of 



INTRODUCTION 

the employers over both political parties 
in the state, and broadened his campaign as 
he went along until he joined his fight to 
the great struggle for reform that was then 
being fought by the whole nation, first 
under Theodore Roosevelt and then under 
Woodrow Wilson. 

During the early years of the European 
war he tried to aid the orphans of Belgium 
and he went to Germany in an attempt to 
organize relief for them and for the starving 
peoples of Poland and Serbia. After Amer- 
ica had entered the conflict he visited Great 
Britain, France, and Italy as an agent of 
our Committee on Public Information and 
of the British War Mission at Washington, 
to voice America's war aims and ideals, and 
to act as a sort of spiritual interpreter be- 
tween us and our associates in the great 
struggle. He was received in Europe as 
if he were an unofficial envoy from the 
hearts of the American people. He had 
the entree to everybody's trust, and he 
spoke in England or in Italy with equal 
credit and authority in the minds of all 
sorts and conditions of men. He returned 
to this country after the war was won, to 
act as the advocate of a moral alliance 



INTRODUCTION 

among the nations in their efforts to com- 
bat those common social injustices and 
class miseries which the war had increased. 
It is as the advocate of such an alliance that 
he speaks in this volume — ^for although the 
actual writing of the book has been a work 
of collaboration, the message is his message 
and the spirit of its utterance is, as nearly as 
possible, his. 

Lindsey is an extraordinary character. 
He has probably taken more punishment 
and received less reward than any other 
leader in the American revolution of the 
last ten years, yet he is as cheerful and en- 
thusiastic as he was when he began his long 
crusade. His sympathy is still as quick as 
it was for the first childish victims of in- 
justice who were brought before his little 
county court in Denver twenty years ago. 
He is now, as he was then, merely a local 
judge with a meager jurisdiction. All the 
powers of furious politicians, of revengeful 
corporations, of the outraged barons of 
industry and finance have been unable 
either to drive him out ot his children's 
court or to seduce him from it. Every op- 
position has equally failed to frighten him, 
to make him pause in his attack, or to force 



INTRODUCTION 

him to compromise in his statement of what 
he believes to be the truth in any pubUc 
matter — whether it be the case against the 
Y. M. C. A. in France which he discusses in 
the first chapter of this volume, or the con- 
spiracy against a democratic peace and the 
League of Nations which he exposes in the 
second, or the social reforms and industrial 
conditions in Europe and America which 
he canvasses in all. And in these days 
when anger and self-interest and the en- 
mities of class quarrels cloud every issue 
and silence so many men, it is well to 
listen to a voice like Lindsey's, whether you 
hiss him or applaud him — for he is speaking 
the undaunted truth concerning conditions 
that it may be of great importance for you 
to understand in the light of events that are 
now preparing in the world. 

Harvey O'Higgins. 



THE DOUGHBOY'S 
RELIGION 



THE DOUGHBOY'S 
RELIGION 



AN American colonel in France was 
±\, having difficulty with his safe. It 
was the headquarters' safe. Its lock had 
jammed, and none of his staff could open it. 
While they were strugghng with it a colored 
sergeant came up to them apologetically. 

^'CuFn'l/' he said, '4f I ain't intrudin' 
into dis heah difficulty, I believes, sah, dat 
I might he'p yah." 

''Yes?" said the colonel. "What do you 
suggest?" 

"Cul'n'l," said the sergeant, "I suggests 
Co'p'l HaU." 

'' ' Corporal HaU?' Why Corporal Hall?" 

*' Co'p'l HaU," the sergeant explained, 
under his voice, "was fo' foah years a 
bugglah." 

They sent for Corporal HaU, and Corporal 
HaU opened the safe. 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

''Well, Sergeant," the colonel said, "I^m 
glad to know about Corporal Hall. I wish 
I'd known it sooner. It would have saved 
us a lot of time with that safe. And tell 
me. Sergeant — in case we may need to call 
on you some day — in what direction do your 
particular talents lie?'' 

"Cul'n'l," the sergeant answered, "ah 
doan' want to tell no lies. Standin' as ah 
does daily in de presence of mah Makeh, 
mos' doubtless ah doan' want to tell no lies. 
But if de time comes when ah kin he'p 
yah, sah, ah'll make a full an' free confes- 
sion, a full an^ free confession, sah." 

When the colonel told me that story I 
enjoyed it as a humorous anecdote. So did 
the others at the table. And I was for 
some time at the front before it dawned on 
me that there was a great deal more in the 
story than mere humor. There was illumi- 
nation in it. 

I had been puzzled by the antagonism 
of the American doughboy to the Y. 
M. C. A. Immediately upon landing in 
France I had found that the Y was ''in 
bad." There was no use blinking the fact 
then, and there is no use trying to keep 
it out of print now, because the returning 

2 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

soldier has made it known everywhere in 
America. The Y was ''in bad/^ and I 
could not understand why. 

The soldiers had many reasons to give 
for their antagonism, but none of the 
reasons seemed sufficient, and most of them 
proved, on investigation, to be ill founded. 
Some of the men complained that the 
Y. M. C. A. had been overcharging them 
for tobacco and cigarettes, but that com- 
plaint was easily disposed of. The Y 
workers had been selling ''smokes" to the 
soldiers at the price which the goods cost 
the Association. That price was higher 
than the same articles cost the soldier in 
the regular army stores, because the army 
did not have to pay freight and the Y did. 
To avoid criticism, the Y had reduced its 
prices. It was now selling tobacco and 
cigarettes at the prices for which they 
could be bought from the quartermaster's 
stores, and the loss was being met out of 
the Association's general fund. Neverthe- 
less, the complaint persisted. 

I found other soldiers who objected that 
the Y never gave anything for nothing, but 
it was obvious that the Y was giving many 
things for nothing. It was giving the rooms 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

in the Y huts, all sorts of free entertain- 
ments, books and writing-materials and 
athletic supplies. It was giving the services 
of thousands of willing workers, who were 
fulfilling a mission of incalculable value to 
the army by keeping up the morale of the 
soldiers. 

And I found the charge that the Y workers 
kept themselves in soft billets behind the 
lines and avoided danger — although hun- 
dreds of these workers were constantly in 
the danger zone and under fire, several had 
been killed, many had been wounded or 
gassed, a number had died of exposure and 
overwork, and some had been decorated for 
conspicuous acts of bravery. 

There were other complaints of various 
sorts, and back of them all was the same 
animosity which was not removed by dis- 
proving the complaints. The reasons which 
the boys gave for their animosity might be 
wholly imaginary reasons. The animosity 
remained only too real. 

On the other hand, the Salvation Army 
was enormously popular. I went, for in- 
stance, to a Salvation Army dugout, back 
of the broken walls of a shell-torn town, 
while the ^'whiz-bangs" were still shrieking 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

overhead and our batteries were boom- 
ing their rephes. The whole group of chat- 
tering, smiling, shouting youngsters who 
greeted me were unanimous in demanding 
that I should be sure to tell the people back 
home to give generously to the "good old 
Salvation Army." We sat around the fire 
while the doughnuts sizzled in a pan of 
grease and the coffee steamed in tin cups 
that were handed out by two Salvation 
lassies; and the boys kept assuring me: 
"I tell you, Judge, the Salvation ladies are 
the real thing. You never see their pictures 
in the magazines, and they don't drink tea 
in any of the swell joints; they're right 
here on the job all the time." Or, "Say, 
Judge, if we hadn't just pulled them out 
of the last town that went to pieces they'd 
have stayed there to be shot up with the 
rest of us." Or: "They feed us up. They 
go under fire with us. And they don't 
preach to us. They're all like these two, 
and, gee! we're /or them!" 

The very same things might have been 
said of many of the Y. M. C. A. workers, 
yet not once did I hear them said. When 
the Y was mentioned, both men and 
officers either criticized or remained silent, 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

and most of the soldiers' criticisms were so 
violent as to be unprintable. 

^' We've had six Y. M. C. A. preachers 
here in the last two weeks," one of the men 
said to me. '^ They've been joy-riding up 
and down the lines, preaching to us about 
the dangers of booze, women, and gambling. 
And it's the holy truth, Judge, we're so 
sore that every one of us is feeling like 
having a hell of a time with all three the 
first leave we get." I heard another soldier 
announce the arrival of a Y preacher by 
singing out, ''Well! Well! Here comes Old 
Wine, Women, and Song again!" Over and 
over, the boys would say, ''That sissyiB.ed 
son of a gun is using up gasolene over here 
to warn us fellows against the skirts, when 
he ought to be down in the trenches where 
he belongs or get to blazes out o' here." 
Or: "What is that dolled-up guy doing 
behind a counter, selling cigarettes and liv- 
ing in the best billet in town, when he 
ought to be soaking with the rest of us? 
He's a fake. That's what he is — a fake!" 
At mess after mess with the officers I would 
hear: "Well, Heaven help the Y after this 
war! How the fellows will hate it!" And 
again and again they would sum it aU up; 

6 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

"The Y is the biggest failure in the war. 
The biggest, bar none!" 

I was myself talking in the Y. M. C. A. 
huts. I knew with what sincere devotion 
the Y workers were giving themselves to 
their work, and it fairly made my heart 
ache to learn how their efforts were unap- 
preciated. It was pathetic to see the be- 
wilderment of many of the preachers and 
secretaries who felt the army's antagonism 
and did not understand the cause of it. I 
found it almost equally pitiful that the sol- 
diers themselves did not know what was the 
matter, but tried to justify their feeUngs by 
making charges against the Y of which it 
was not guilty. 

What was really wrong? 

The truth became apparent in a very 
curious way. Some of the Y workers pro- 
posed that the soldiers at the Y meetings 
should be asked to answer a questionnaire 
in which they should name the three cardi- 
nal sins that were most abhorred by the 
soldier. The average answer was to be 
taken as a ''message" from the doughboys 
in France to those back in America. And, 
of course, it was hoped that, after all the 

crusading that had been done against 

7 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

drinking, gambling, and sexual immorality, 
the boys would line up solidly against those 
three vices. 

The result was startling. No matter 
where the vote was taken, and no matter 
how the question was asked, the soldiers 
answered invariably that to them the first 
great sin was cowardice, and the first great 
virtue was courage. 

With the same unanimity they replied 
that the second worst sin was selfishness, 
and the second greatest virtue self-sacrifice. 

The third vice was variously expressed as 
snobbishness, big-headedness, boastfulness, 
or hypocrisy. And one of the Y secre- 
taries told me that when he tried to get the 
boys to declare against personal immorality 
they just gave him the ^' horse-laugh." 

Here, then, was one fundamental cause 
of misunderstanding between the Y and the 
men whom it was so eager to help. In the 
directions issued by the Association to its 
workers the greatest stress was laid upon 
the importance of saving soldiers from sin 
and getting them to "accept and follow 
Jesus Christ." These were declared to be 
"fundamental objectives." They were so 
given in the Manual of Camp Work issued 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

to secretaries and workers as late as June, 
1918. And the soldiers had no patience 
with such objectives. As one of them put 
it to me: ''Look at that bunch of rough- 
necks there! Not a one of them has seen 
the inside of a church in years, but I tell 
you they're real Christians. They love one 
another, and it's the real thing in loving, for 
they'd lay down their lives for one another 
and divide their last crumb with a comrade. 
We get that sort of thing at the front more 
than we ever had it in the churches or in 
the Y. M. C. A. at home. And when we're 
doing it and feeling it here the less talk they 
give us about it the better — especially when 
the talk comes from some of these doUed-up 
guys that don't know as much about it as 
we do." 

When I went into the trenches I could 
see for myself. Here was true Christianity 
in action, before the face of death, under 
circumstances that made any preaching, 
however eloquent, seem tawdry. I did not 
need to be told it. It was in the way in 
which one of them would wrap me in a 
trench-coat, and another show me how to 
protect myself with a gas-mask, and a third 
outfit me with a helmet. It was in the 

9 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

friendly cautiousness with which they led 
me into the first-line trenches, and it was in 
the way the men in machine-gun pits and 
dugouts greeted me and my guides — ^in 
cheerful whispers, full of comradeship and 
unspoken affection. These men were prac- 
tising their fundamental virtues, courage, 
self-sacrifice, and sincere humility. In a 
very real sense they were saving the world. 
They were laying down their lives for 
humanity. They were loving their neigh- 
bors as themselves and better than them- 
selves. Face to face with eternity, they 
were truly following the example of Christ 
on the cross. They were not thinking of 
saving their souls. They were thinking of 
nothing so selfish. And when they came 
back from that Calvary in which they had 
seen their comrades die, what patience 
would they have with smug exhortations 
about personal sins, individual salvation, 
and the seH-satisfaction of superior virtue? 
Naturally, they had none whatever. If 
you preach to a man that he must do right 
because he will be punished if he does 
wrong, you are preaching a cowardly ethic. 
It does not matter whether you threaten 
him with jail or with heU-fire, you are ap- 

10 



\ * 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

pealing to his fear. Such appeals are never 
very effective, even in peace-time. I have 
found them a complete failure among chil- 
dren in our juvenile-court work, for ex- 
ample. And to the soldiers they were 
worse than puerile. They offended against 
the first tenet of the doughboy's faith — 
that the most^ damnable of all sins is 
cowardice. 

Similarly, the men resented the way in 
which the preachers handled the question of 
sexual immorality, although they did not 
at all resent the handling of the same sub- 
ject by their officers. The difference was 
due to the fact that the officers and the 
wiser Y. M. C. A. workers made a straight 
appeal to the boys to avoid immorality in 
order to keep themselves "fighting fit'' and 
to protect their comrades from the infection 
of disease. They pointed out the physical 
effects of sexual vice and lectured on the 
use of prophylactics to guard against in- 
fection. They appealed to the men's loy- 
alty to the cause for which they were fight- 
ing and to their loyalty to the comrades 
who were fighting beside them. The wiser 
Y. M. C. A. workers, as I have said, made 

the same plea, but I heard one of the Y 

11 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

leaders in England argue against the use of 
prophylactics because these would save the 
sinner from the ''blight of sin." He was 
willing to have the innocent suffer with the 
guilty, ''even to the third and fourth gen- 
eration." He insisted that the only sal- 
vation in such matters came from the saving 
grace of redemption in "the blood of the 
Lamb." And this selfish and antisocial 
point of view, offensive enough in times of 
peace, was abhorrent to the soldier, whose 
whole life and personality had been sub- 
merged in the great common fight of his 
nation for its social existence. 

Furthermore, some of the Y workers 
arrived in France with an evangelical Sun- 
day-school attitude of superior virtue. They 
were men who had been picked for their 
mission as being conspicuously free of the 
vices of drinking, gambling, and personal 
immorality. They came to uplift the un- 
regenerate roughneck by precept and ex- 
ample. They had no opportunity to show 
their courage. Their personal sacrifice was 
so small beside the soldier's self-immo- 
lation that it was quite invisible. And 
their assumption of evangelical superiority 
seemed to convict them of the soldier's 

12 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

third cardinal sin — snobbishness, lack of 
humility, boastfulness. The army called 
them the ^^Holier-than-thou's." 

The Salvation Army avoided this re- 
proach by not preaching, by giving devoted 
service only, and by sharing the soldier's 
daily life of hardship and danger as much as 
possible. The Salvation lassie had learned 
humility in street-corner meetings, and in 
services in dark and dingy little buildings 
where the very poor and lowly came. The 
doughboy had seen those meetings at home, 
and he knew how humble they were. He 
saw among the '^Salvation ladies" no un- 
conscious assumption of superior holiness. 
The Salvation Army had no money to spend 
on motor-cars and gasolene and comfort- 
able billets for its workers, and those work- 
ers were not of the social class that has 
afternoon tea at conspicuous hotels and in- 
evitably gets its pictures in the newspapers. 
They practised the doughboy's religion, and 
the boys loved them. 

I had heard that the war had brought a 
great rehgious revival among the warring 
people of Europe, and I had expected to see 
signs of it among the soldiers. There were 
none of the traditional sort. I asked the 

13 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

officers of most of the Allied forces in 
France, and they replied that there was no 
religious revival. "Go to the churches," 
they said, "and see." So I went to church 
after church and found them empty. I 
attended a service at Westminster Abbey, 
and saw a few conventional church attend- 
ants scattered throughout the chill gloom 
and echoing emptiness of that great tomb 
of England's dead. And when the clergy- 
men mounted the pulpit it was to bemoan 
the fact, as he said, that "the Church seems 
no longer able to lead," that it had "lost its 
influence with the toilers of the world," and 
that the loss was "mostly the fault of the 
Church." 

He seemed as pitiful as the bewildered Y 
workers who realized that they had lost their 
influence with the army. Unfortunately, 
there was no one there to propose that 
the churches should submit a questionnaire 
to the toilers of the world. But on that 
very same day I had seen the toilers of Lon- 
don answering the unspoken question of the 
clergyman in Westminster Abbey, although 
they had answered it by their actions more 
than by words. 

I had seen thousands of working men and 

14 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

women going in what was really a religious 
procession to Albert Hall, carrying the ban- 
ners of their faith. On those banners were 
inscribed such dogmas as ''Justice, not 
Charity," and ''What we fought for we are 
going to have." Albert Hall was crowded. 
Ten thousand people stood outside the build- 
ing after it was filled to suffocation. And 
the men and women who spoke to this en- 
thusiastic congregation preached the same 
religion that I had seen lived in the trenches 
of France. 

That was the answer. There was a 
great rehgious revival in Europe, but it was 
not the selfish religion of individual salva- 
tion; and the churches failed in the war, as 
the Y. M. C. A. failed, because the churches 
were still preaching from the text, "What 
shaU it profit a man if he gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul?" and the peo- 
ple were thinking, "What shall it profit a 
man to save his own soul if the whole world 
is to be lost?" The preachers were preach- 
ing the old cowardly religion of individual 
salvation. The people were living the 
brave new religion of the salvation of the 
world. The preachers were denouncing 
drinking, gambling, and immorality. The 

2 15 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

people were denouncing cowardice, selfish- 
ness, and egotism. 

That is why the incident of Corporal Hall 
and the colonel's safe was illuminating to 
me. Under the old religion, Corporal Hall 
was an outcast and a sinner. Under the 
new religion, he had become one of the 
saviors of the world, ready to die for his 
fellows. Some of the finest soldiers that I 
met in France had been convicts. One of 
the most courageous had been one of the 
worst of ''sinners'' in time of peace. An- 
other, whom I came to respect and admire 
immensely, had been convicted as a thief. 
Moreover, I met some who in peace-times 
had aided in stealing public-utility fran- 
chises or had otherwise promoted schemes to 
rob and exploit great masses of people — 
evils, of course, far more harmful than burg- 
lary or petty stealing. And all these men 
had been converted, so to speak, to the new 
religion of war. They had learned to serve, 
to sacrifice, and, if need be, to die for others. 

The Y. M. C. A. is a great institution. 
It has done a great work in peace as well as 
in war. It would be unworthy of its oppor- 
tunity if it did not take to heart the lesson 
which the doughboy tried to teach it. For 

16 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

that is a peace-time lesson also, and the 
failure of the Y and the failure of the 
churches during this war is the same failure 
that they were guilty of in time of peace. 
The war has only made their failure more 
glaringly obvious. 

The Christian religion is not a religion of 
individual salvation and selfish virtue. It 
is a religion of love and self-sacrifice and 
humility. The preachers who went up and 
down the battle-lines in automobiles, ex- 
horting the men to save their own souls, 
made the mistake of the preachers who 
carry the same message up and down the 
lines in peace-time. The expensive auto- 
mobiles and the comfortable billets in war 
are the expensive chtirches and the fat cleri- 
cal livings of peace. The men in the front- 
line trenches are the toilers in the dangers 
and hardships of the country's essential in- 
dustries. The antagonism between the sol- 
dier and the Y worker is the antagonism 
between the working-man and the fashion- 
able preacher. In the great war which 
society is always waging against the forces 
of nature, the men in the trenches of indus- 
try are the front-line soldiers protecting 
the world against want and hardship, while 

17 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

they suffer and die themselves that others 
may be safe. Great masses of those others, 
the idle and leisured classes, live without a 
thought for the welfare of the man who toils 
for them. They go to church to be told 
how to save their own selfish souls, and this 
religion has as little appeal to the soldier of 
peace as to the soldier of war. 

What the churches and the Y. M. C. A. 
had to learn in Europe they have to learn 
in America. They must preach and prac- 
tise the religion of service. Westminster 
Abbey will be as crowded as Albert Hall 
when the surpliced clergyman mounts the 
pulpit in the Abbey to demand that society 
shall do for its workers what it does for its 
soldiers, and denounce the parasite and the 
exploiter of the people in peace-time as the 
slacker and the traitor are denounced in 
war-time, and organize the industries of 
peace for the common good of all citizens 
as the industries of war are organized. 

A transport, called the France, recently 
arrived at its pier in New York with several 
thousand American soldiers and officers 
from the front. Some one called for cheers 
for the Red Cross. The men responded with 
a will. A call for cheers for the Salvation 

18 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Army met with as hearty a response. "Now, 
altogether," a soldier shouted, "three cheers 
for the Y. M. C. A. !" And the doughboys 
answered, "Boo!" 

The same answer is waiting for the 
churches unless they learn their lesson. 
The preacher must get into the fight for 
humanity if he is to regain his influence with 
humanity. He must give up his automo- 
bile and his soft billet behind the war zone, 
and share the hardships and the struggles 
of mankind, preaching courage, unselfish- 
ness, and humility by his example, trying 
to save men from sin by changing the con- 
ditions that make for sin, and saving his 
own soul by helping to save the world. 
The Joint Commission on Social Service 
of the Protestant Episcopal Church has 
seen the light. It "earnestly urges the 
Church at large to study the program of the 
British Labor party, characterized by Bish- 
op Brent 'as the one great religious utter- 
ance of the war.'" This great religious 
utterance declared for a reconstruction of 
the national life in order to use the surplus 
wealth of the nation for the good of all the 
people of^the nation, and to assure to every 
citizen the decent opportunity to live a 

19 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

healthy and happy and serviceable life. 
There is no other hope for the churches. 
The war has discovered a new religion — a 
religion ages old — ^the religion of Christ in 
action. The churches must preach and 
practise that rehgion or prepare to hear their 
call for cheers greeted with a universal 
''Boo!" when democracy's next great cam- 
paign is over and the ships again come in. 



THE JUNKER FAITH 

SO much for the doughboy's religion. 
There is a rival faith among men — a 
faith that was largely responsible for the 
European war, but had little enough to say 
for itself while the battles were being 
fought, and became voluble again only 
when the doughboy's code had saved the 
world. I should call it the junker's faith, 
although it is believed and practised not 
by junkers only, but by many simple, 
democratic people who seem to accept it as 
something aristocratic and superior, or as a 
practical code for a practical and selfish 
order of society and a workaday world. 

A German officer once expressed it to me 
most completely — at the Hotel Adlon in 
Berlin, in February, 1916, when the United 
States was still neutral and the Crown 
Prince's army was hammering at the gates 
of Verdun. 

''America and Germany are natural al- 

21 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

lies," he argued. ' ' France, Russia, and Italy- 
are too temperamental, too visionary, too 
revolutionary. They are trouble-makers. 
You Americans are practical. You put the 
affairs of your country in the control of the 
intelligent classes, as we do in Germany. 
You do not do it openly, as we do. You 
let the people believe that they govern 
themselves, but you have sense enough to 
leave the real power where it ought to be — 
in the hands of the practical people, the 
business men. You call them the 'invisible 
government.' " 

I interrupted to object that the American 
people were largely in revolt against this 
'' invisible government.'' 

''No," he said; "the fact that it is per- 
mitted to rule shows that the thinking people 
want it to rule. Your intellectual classes 
must know in their hearts that its rule is 
necessary if your present order of society 
is to be maintained." 

He was a chance acquaintance, an officer 
of no importance, whom I had met at a 
dinner. But he was a typical junker, 
and I recognized in his arguments many 
thoughts that had been only faintly indi- 
cated in more official circles. He did not 

22 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

know — ^as German officialdom was perhaps 
informed — ^that I had spent most of my 
public life campaigning against our ^'invisi- 
ble government'' in one way or another. 
He was correspondingly outspoken. 

He insisted that the people were not^fit 
to rule themselves, even in America. We 
had found that out, he said. "We pretended 
that we had a democracy, but our govern- 
ment was absolutely dominated, ruled, and 
controlled by what he called our ''intelli- 
gent classes." He maintained that this was 
a wise and necessary condition of affairs 
and that it gave us good government. Our 
Constitution and our whole political system, 
to his mind, were just a camouflage. So 
long as these served the purpose of the 
privileged class they were maintained, but 
whenever they interfered with that purpose 
they were ignored or evaded — and he con- 
sidered this inevitable and practical and 
altogether wise. 

I had come to Berlin with a plan for re- 
lieving Poland and Serbia by the same 
means that the Belgian Relief Commission 
had brought relief to Belgium. In the 
course of negotiations I had met numerous 
German statesmen, government officials, 

23 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGIO'N 

financiers, army officers, and junkers of all 
sorts. And, in conversation with many of 
them, I had caught glimpses of the point of 
view which this officer was now opening up 
to me quite frankly. 

Herr Zimmermann, the Kaiser's Secretary 
of State, had merely warned me that the 
United States would yet have to unite with 
Germany against the socialists, and he pre- 
dicted that America would come to see the 
wisdom of the Kaiser's plan to crush the 
socialists before they could upset the world. 

Another German official contented him- 
self with impressing on me the dangers of 
socialism and paternalism. It was true, 
he said, that in Germany the individual had 
to give way to the state, but the German 
state was a commercial, imperialistic state, 
organized in the interests of the strong for 
the protection of the weak, who were not 
fit or able to govern themselves. 

The conversation of my friend in the 
Adlon explained why these arguments were 
supposed likely to be effective with an 
American. Our invisible government, he 
believed, corresponded to the German sys- 
tem of junker rule. He was convinced that 
in our hearts we recognized the inability of 

24 



T:HE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

the people to govern themselves, and that 
we had placed our government in the hands 
of our junkers secretly, just as the Ger- 
mans had placed theirs in the hands of 
their junkers openly. The ambitions of 
our junkers were, to him, the same as the 
ambitions of the German junkers — trade 
and trade-domination, spheres of influence 
to exploit, a place in the sun. 

It seemed to me that he was talking of 
an invisible government that was no longer 
in power in the United States. I explained 
that President Wilson's first election had 
been a defeat for our reactionaries, who had 
hoped to divide the Progressive vote be- 
tween Wilson and Roosevelt so as to slip 
Taft into power. And President Wilson's 
first term had been full of disasters for the 
invisible government. His measures of do- 
mestic reform had deprived them of many 
of their most ancient privileges, and his 
policy in China and in Mexico had been a 
repudiation of their control in foreign affairs. 
It seemed to me that, as a government, 
they were more than usually invisible now, 
because they were in a fair way to disap- 
pear completely. 

The officer smiled. ''The people are not 

25 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

fit to rule," he said. "If you have not 
found it out in America, it is because you 
have never tried to take your affairs into 
your own hands. You have allowed your 
practical men to rule. If you get rid of 
your invisible government, you will learn." 

I found this whole point of view quite 
common among the German commercial 
junkers. It was part of their religion that 
war between nations is as inevitable as 
competition between businesses, that every 
war is at bottom a trade war, and that the 
war in which they were then engaged had 
been inevitable because of the trade jeal- 
ousy and commercial rivalry between Ger- 
many and Great Britain. Of course, they 
did not preach that doctrine to the com- 
mon people. They knew that the mass of 
Germans would not fight and die for mar- 
kets any more than the mass of Americans 
would. And by means of false news and 
forged despatches the German people had 
been deceived into beheving that their 
country had been invaded before the Kaiser 
declared war, and that they were fighting 
holy battles in the national self-defense. 

Curiously enough, it would seem from 
Prince Lichnowsky's confessions that the 

26 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

commercial jmikers of Germany were them- 
selves deceived by the military junkers. 
Lichnowsky has admitted that while he was 
German ambassador to Great Britain, just 
before the outbreak of the war, the British 
government made every sort of conciliatory 
concession to German trade in Portuguese 
Africa and in the matter of the Berlin- 
Bagdad Railway. And Lichnowsky implies 
that the treaties offering these concessions 
were suppressed, unsigned, by the German 
government because their pubhcation would 
have destroyed the fiction of British jeal- 
ousy of German trade expansion. Accord- 
ing to Lichnowsky, therefore — and subse- 
quent events have proved him right — the 
military junkers of Germany were "gov- 
erning" the commercial junkers exactly as 
the commercial junkers thought the people 
should be governed. The military junkers 
were practising a rehgion that was a sort 
of High Church version of the commercial 
junker's faith. They were engaged in a 
war that had as its object not merely the 
commercial exploitation, but the complete 
enslavement of the weaker nations of Eu- 
rope and the establishment of a tyranny of 
the aristocratic, military class. 

27. 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Of this, the German commercial junkers 
seemed to be, as yet, entirely unaware. 
They were convinced that they were engaged 
in a struggle against the imperialistic trade 
ambitions of the privileged classes in Great 
Britain and her allies. They argued that 
our invisible government in the United 
States was the natural aUy of the all-too- 
visible autocracy of Germany in such a 
conflict. In Holland and the Scandinavian 
countries I found a similar point of view that 
varied only in its patriotic details. How- 
ever nobly and heroically the common 
people were fighting for the liberties of 
their beloved countries, the junkers of 
Europe apparently believed that the war 
was reaUy a struggle between the privileged 
classes of the more powerful European peo- 
ples for the right to exploit the weaker ones. 
There was, moreover, much convincing talk 
about secret treaties between the Allies, by 
which treaties the right to exploit here or 
there was adjudicated and agreed upon in 
advance of victory. And when I returned 
to America I watched with interest Presi- 
dent Wilson's efforts to save the United 
States from being involved in the doubtful 
issue of such a doubtful conflict. 

^28 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

It was obvious enough that all our Ameri- 
can junkers were against him. He an- 
nounced his fundamental policy, again and 
again, ''America will have forgotten her 
traditions whenever she fights merely for 
herself under such circumstances as will 
show that she has forgotten to fight for all 
mankind." The junkers declared that 
this was poltroonery. Their voice was all 
for war. And the louder their voices grew 
the more convinced were the masses of the 
American people that the war was a rich 
man's war, a capitalists' war, a trade war. 
The American junkers, exasperated because 
President Wilson's domestic policies had 
so curtailed their privileges, attempted to 
defeat him on his foreign policy and his atti- 
tude toward the European conflict. He 
was re-elected by the vote of the Progres- 
sive and anti-junker West. 

Meantime, a change was becoming evi- 
dent in the nature and purposes of the war 
itself. In Germany the militaristic junkers 
were wholly in control; the commercial 
junkers were discovering that they had 
been deceived, and the war had become a 
war for and against dynastic conquest and 
autocratic world-dominion. In the Allied 

29 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

countries the privileged classes were either 
yielding their power to the masses of the 
people, as in England, or losing that power 
to a revolution of the people, as in Russia. 
With the publication of the secret treaties 
between Great Britain, France, Italy, and 
czarist Russia, it was apparent to what sort 
of struggle President Wilson had refused to 
become a party. The people had been 
fighting a war for the salvation of liberty. 
The junkers had been preparing to divide 
the fruits of conquest in the good old junker 
way. When President Wilson announced 
that the United States would fight 'Ho 
make the world safe for democracy,'' he 
not only voiced the American ideal; he spoke 
also for the new sentiment of the people of 
Great Britain, Russia, France, and Italy. 
He did for the World War what Abraham 
Lincoln did for the Civil War — ^he gave it a 
soul that could not be defeated; he brought 
to it a popular support that made victory 
certain. 

All the American junkers acclaimed his 
purpose and rallied to his banner. And no 
one who knows human nature will doubt 
that they enlisted with the sincerest patriot- 
ism "to do their bit." But it soon became 

30 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

plain enough that many of them had their 
own interests and their own aims — interests 
that were class interests and aims that were 
class aims. One did not need to wait for 
the signing of the armistice in order to learn 
that they were supporting the President 
with the mental reservation that they were 
willing to help win the war on his terms, in 
order to make peace on their terms. Their 
maneuvers to that end were observable 
long before the Congressional campaign in 
which they dropped all pretense of sup- 
porting him. In the West, from the begin- 
ning, their game was played openly and 
boldly. 

There, for a decade past, the junkers had 
been in a losing fight. Measures of popu- 
lar control had deprived the corporation 
corruptionists of their power over both po- 
litical parties. The campaigns of the Pro- 
gressives had defeated those tools in office 
who had represented the invisible govern- 
ment of the privileged classes. The West 
had largely been made safe for democracy. 

The war did not change that. But 
when the call for patriotic home service 
came the men most free to respond were 
the men of comparative leisure, the men 

3 31 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

of income, the men of large affairs. They 
were the men most needed by the gov- 
ernment to organize the country locally, 
because they had the experience and the 
social power. They formed the state coun- 
cils of defense. They organized the loy- 
alty leagues. They headed the local com- 
mittees of the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A,, 
and the Liberty Loan drives. They took 
the local dollar-a-year offices for the food 
administration and the fuel administration, 
'and often, where they had power, they re- 
warded their old political associates by ap- 
pointing them to lesser offices. 

There followed such incidents as this: 
In one of our Western states the forces of 
reform, after years of campaigning, had suc- 
ceeded in defeating for re-election one of 
the most defiant political crooks who ever 
held pubfic office. His defeat was scarcely 
more than made certain by a court decision 
when he was appointed food-controller for 
his district. All protest in the state was 
vain. The matter was carried to Wash- 
ington and his resignation was obtained, 
but the man who succeeded him was another 
of the same stripe. Useless to complain! 
The men who had the local power to ap- 

32 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

point him were the junkers whom he had 
long served as henchman. Washington was 
not to blame. It had to accept the patri- 
otic services of the junkers and their tool, 
relying on their patriotism and forgiving 
their political records. The rest of us had 
to do the same. 

The junkers, however, neither forgot nor 
forgave. In several of the Western states 
the farmers had organized the Non-Partizan 
League to fight the men who were oppressing 
them by means of railway control, and 
banking control, and control of grain-ele- 
vators, and the power in the state legisla- 
tures that made these controls effective. 
Many of the farmers and their leaders in 
the league had been opposed to American 
participation in the war because they had 
become convinced that it was a junker war. 
They had not kept pace with the changes 
in the character of the war itself. German 
propaganda was very active among them. 
When America entered the conflict their 
past utterances made them liable to charges 
of disloyalty. Their old enemies, the local 
junkers, promptly seized the opportunity. 
They organized loyalty leagues and pubHc- 

safety commissions, denounced the Non- 
33 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Partizan Leaguers as traitors, and pro- 
ceeded to mob them and deport them and 
indict them and tar and feather them. The 
government at Washington sent out speak- 
ers to the Non-Partizan League, through 
the Committee on PubUc Information. The 
local defense committees refused to allow 
these speakers to address public meetings 
of league members. The junkers did not 
wish to have the farmers rallied to the sup- 
port of the war; they wished to have them 
marked as disloyalists so that the Non-Par- 
tizan League might be destroyed. 

They failed. The Western farmers, in 
spite of this persecution, gave their support 
to President Wilson and his war aims whole- 
heartedly. They oversubscribed to Liberty 
Loans and to all the funds of war-relief. 
They planted wheat when they could have 
made more profit out of oats and barley. 
And when the local junkers dropped their 
pretense of supporting the President and 
began to advocate a junker peace, with the 
same old provisions for imperial trade and 
commercial exploitation, the farmers re- 
mained for the most part true to the Presi- 
dent's democratic ideals, even though the 
junkers tried to inflame them against the 

34 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

administration by arguing that the food 
board's campaign of food-control and price- 
fixing had been an injustice to the farmer 
that should be resented. 

In the same way the junkers on the West- 
em state councils of defense and public- 
safety commissions and loyalty leagues took 
advantage of their opportunity to proceed 
against all their old opponents in labor 
circles and reform groups. The slightest 
reference to our bad industrial conditions 
was seized upon as socialism, bolshevism, 
disloyalty, pro-Germanism. Dr. Charles 
Zueblin, lecturing in Colorado Springs be- 
fore an association oi grade teachers, spoke 
of the unequal distribution of wealth in 
America and the need for industrial re- 
forms. His loyalty was undoubted and his 
long record of public service well known. 
Nevertheless, he was promptly attacked as 
a German propagandist and compelled to 
cancel his second lecture. As a result of the 
consequent newspaper notoriety he tem- 
porarily left the lecture platform. 

Prof. S. H. Clark, of the University of 
Chicago, came to Colorado to speak under 
the auspices of the Red Cross and to solicit 
contributions to its funds. In the course 

35 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

of one of his appeals he spoke of how small 
an amount of money it was that the Red 
Cross needed as compared with the yearly- 
income of the nation. The entire amount 
required, he said, was only a fraction of the 
yearly dividends of one corporation, the 
steel trust. A beneficiary of that trust was 
in the audience. He challenged Professor 
Clark's statement indignantly. Professor 
Clark rephed with the figures to prove his 
case. He was allowed to finish his speech, 
but he had offended the junkers unforgiv- 
ably — ^though innocently enough — and he 
was not allowed to finish the tour of speeches 
that had been booked for him in Colorado. 
It followed, naturally, that any public 
man who had ever been marked as an anti- 
junker ''agitator" was given no opportunity 
to join in the hundred and one patriotic 
campaigns that were made on behalf of 
the government loans and war charities. 
There was a wall of silence put around him. 
Only the junkers and their friends could 
show their patriotism under the state aus- 
pices. And when the Congressional cam- 
paign opened, in the summer of 1918, the 
purpose of that conspiracy of silence was 
apparent. The junker candidates stood 

36 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

conspicuously on the patriotic platform 
under the official flag, and their opponents 
were left in outer darkness, discredited by 
their long lack of opportunity to partici- 
pate in the battle-cries of the home-front. 
The junkers won. 

Remembering my conversation with the 
officials in Berlin, I watched these Western 
developments with interest. I watched, 
also, the public but disguised campaign 
which the junkers all over the United 
States were making against every member 
of the Wilson administration whom they 
suspected of being Progressive. 

Before the war they had concentrated 
their fire on Secretary Daniels. He had 
offended them by trying to democratize 
the navy and by daring to protect it from 
those business interests who were supplying 
it with armament and munitions at exorbi- 
tant prices. They started a nation-wide 
campaign of ridicule against him, financing 
it out of what their publicity agents called 
"the Daniels pot." They made the nation 
believe that Secretary Daniels was only a 
greater joke than the ridiculously inefficient 
navy which he had disorganized. As a 
matter of fact, the navy was in the pink of 

37 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

condition, as the first three months of war 
showed. Secretary Daniels's work, as the 
Enghsh experts admitted, was ''one of the 
really great performances of the war." The 
campaign against him had been one of 
slander and facetious lies. 

That did not prevent the junkers from 
making an exactly similar campaign against 
Secretary Baker as soon as he showed that 
he would not allow labor to be exploited 
under any government war contracts. The 
sweat-shop employers among the clothing 
manufacturers would not make overcoats 
for the army on those terms of decent hours, 
wages, and working conditions which the 
War Department demanded. When the 
severe cold weather came the soldiers were 
short of overcoats; Secretary Baker was 
being denounced and investigated in Con- 
gress, and his opponents were giving inter- 
views to the New York papers, declaring 
that they could not get War Department 
work for their idle employees because of 
Secretary Baker's "sociological theories." 

The campaign of lies and ridicule against 
Mr. Baker, which still persists, was only 
equaled by a like campaign against George 
Greel, chairman of the Committee on Pub- 

38 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

lie Information, who was marked as a radi- 
cal by the junkers and denounced beyond 
all whooping. There was never any better 
case against Baker or Creel than there had 
been against Daniels. When I was in 
France in the last year of the war Marshal 
Joffre spoke to me of Secretary Baker as 
''one of the most efficient men that the war 
has produced/' and the miraculous per- 
formance of the American army in France 
has since given Marshal Joffre's expert 
judgment the vindication of subsequent 
events. Those who knew Creel's work 
know that he did a big job in a big way; and 
the unanimity of America's effort and the 
amazing force of our civilian morale in the 
war were as much due to him as to any other 
one man except President Wilson himself. 

In the spring of 1916, unable to find an 
opportunity to help our war program in 
Colorado, I went abroad for the Committee 
on Public Information and the British War 
Mission at Washington. And what I saw 
in England — as contrasted with what I had 
been watching in the United States — can be 
indicated in a single incident. 

One Sunday we were invited to the Astor 
country home at Cliveden, where I was to 

39 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

make an address to the wounded soldiers 
who were in hospital on the Astor estate. 
Among the other week-end guests was Mr. 
James Thomas, one of the leaders of the 
British Labor party, who had been an en- 
gine-driver. He was a friend of the Wal- 
dorf Astors and a frequent guest at Cliveden. 
At the close of my address Mrs. Astor, pre- 
siding at the meeting, invited Mr. Thomas 
to move the customary vote of thanks to 
the speaker, and when he had finished she 
said to the assembled Tommies, ''Now, boys, 
while we have Mr. Thomas here, let us see 
if we can't persuade Mm to give us a talk 
next Sunday afternoon." 

The soldier boys applauded the sugges- 
tion, and Mr. Thomas, in response to them, 
accepted the invitation. 

''Thank you," Mrs. Astor smiled. "And 
may I announce the subject of your ad- 
dress?" 

Mr. Thomas bowed. "I should like to 
talk," he replied, cheerfully, "on what the 
British Labor party proposes to do with 
CUveden and the other Astor estates after 
the war." 

The soldiers laughed. Mrs. Astor laughed. 
Mr. Thomas joined them. 

40 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

"That will be very interesting," Mrs. 
Astor said. "I'm sure you'll be glad to 
hear, boys, what Mr. Thomas's party in- 
tends to do with Cliveden after the war. 
I know / shall be glad to learn. I have 
been trying to find out, for some time. 
And if I may make a suggestion, Mr. 
Thomas, I should very much like to have 
you turn it into a boarding-house and make 
me the landlady, although, in that case, 
Mr. Thomas, you will have to pay your 
board — a thing, you know, which you have 
never done in the past." 

The joke was on Thomas. He acknowl- 
edged it, and the meeting broke up in laugh- 
ter and applause. 

Do I need to emphasize the difference 
between such a scene and what would have 
happened to any speaker in America who 
offered to discuss in a hall on the Rockefel- 
ler estates what the United States govern- 
ment should do with the Rockefeller fort- 
une after the war? 

Mr. Thomas and his party in England 
were proposing that all such great landed 
estates as Cliveden should be nationalized 
and brought back into use for the good of 
all the people of England. The owners of 

41 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

those estates were saying, as one of them 
said to me: ''It's for the good of old Eng- 
land, and it's in line with the new justice, 
and why shouldn't the land be put to a bet- 
ter use than most of us have made of it? 
God Almighty put the land here. We 
didn't make it — or anything in it." And, 
under the supervision of the Minister of 
Agriculture, these estates were already being 
brought under cultivation, by tenants, on 
terms dictated by the government and 
accepted without complaint by the owners. 
This difference between the attitude of 
the privileged classes in England and in the 
United States was not a difference that was 
due to any inherent virtue over there or 
any natural depravity over here. It was 
due to the fact that the war had taken Eng- 
land by the throat and frightened all classes 
into the realization that they were the heads 
and legs and arms of a common body, which 
could not defend itself successfully unless it 
had the use and service of every member of 
its make-up. Wealth had found that money 
had no hands with which to fight, that it 
could not buy men to lay down their lives 
for it. The privileged classes had learned 
that "sb man would fight for a home, but 

42 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

not for a boarding-house," that he had to 
be given a greater stake in the country than 
the right to earn his food and lodging there, 
that it had to be made his country, too. 
The heads of industry discovered that the 
working-man had to be given a proprietary 
interest in the business, sitting with the 
board of management, and helping to set 
his own wages and arrange his conditions 
of work. The working-man had found it 
necessary to give up his own class privi- 
leges, when these interfered with the fighting 
efficiency of the nation, and to accept the 
greater privileges of equality and common 
responsibility that had arisen from a com- 
mon danger. In America the pressure of 
the war had not been strong enough to 
force such facts upon us. 

England, like a slothful and enervated 
man, had suddenly been summoned to a 
violent struggle for life. It had to get it- 
self hardened and trued up, or die. The 
United States faced no such desperate crisis. 
We had time to move slowly, without strain. 
Such strength as we had we put into play 
craftily. We had only just begun to dis- 
cover our weaknesses when the war closed. 
And up to that time we had been able to 

43 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

conceal those sore spots from ourselves by 
refusing to notice them, by denying that 
they existed, and by chloroforming into si- 
lence all the protests that were the symp- 
tomatic aches and twinges of our constitu- 
tional weaknesses. 

We were trying to strengthen ourselves 
by a sort of faith-cure. The Enghsh had 
gone almost to the other extreme. They 
were watching themselves, for political iUs 
and social debilities, like a hypochondriac. 
The dinner-table conversations that we 
heard among distinguished people were dis- 
cussions of aU sorts of national problems — 
child labor, divorce reform, children's courts, 
mothers' pensions, maternity laws, the 
rights of illegitimate children, the new social 
conscience, the use and misuse of land, the 
war between capital and labor, the problem 
of Ireland, the abolition of j^special privileges, 
and so forth. And these questions were 
discussed without bitterness, with a toler- 
ance that was engagingly frank, in a sincere 
desire to find solutions that should be just 
and fair to aU, and wholly to the national 
advantage. Imagine such discussions at the 
dinner-tables of Fifth Avenue or Newport! 

While the American Federation of Labor 

44 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

was gingerly acquiring an eight-hour day 
and the right to collective bargaining, the 
British Labor party was moving for the 
common ownership not only of the nation's 
land, but of its railways, canals, coal, iron, 
and electric power. They were demanding 
a democratic control of all industry, of the 
insurance business, of the food-supply, and 
of the importation of raw materials. They 
did not stop at proposing almost confisca- 
tory income taxes and death dues; they 
contemplated finding a way to take over 
all the nation's surplus wealth for the na- 
tional use. And they proposed to use that 
wealth to abolish ignorance, preventable 
disease, unemployment, and all the ills in 
England that came from lack of education 
and lack of work — ^to secure, in fact, "aU 
the requisites of healthy life and worthy 
citizenship." 

In America we would have denounced 
such aims as pure bolshevism. In England 
I did not hear them denounced at all. The 
argument was all upon the means by which 
they could be attained — ^whether the ills 
could be cured in the way that the British 
Labor party advocated or whether it could 
be done more safely and easily in other 

45 



'-0 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

ways. My experience had taught me that 
the employing classes in the United States 
regarded the labor problem as a servant 
problem. They were determined to be 
masters in their own house. The servants 
could work or quit. The war had taught 
the English that labor was not a servant, but 
a member of the family. The employees 
were not merely working in the house — 
they were also owners of it. They were 
defending it, fighting for it, dying for it. 
They were as necessary to its success and 
safety as the members of the family who 
lived on the upper floors. Their health 
and happiness, their comfort and loyal- 
ty, had to be provided for, or the house 
would fall. 

I found no fear of bolshevism. That 
tyranny of the lower floors over the upper 
had been made impossible by the realiza- 
tion that all the floors were inhabited by 
one family, working together for the com- 
mon safety and the happiness of all. There 
was no more danger ot tyranny from below 
than of tyranny from above. Every class 
was willing to do whatever was "for the 
good of old England." War had taught 
them their lesson, and they were looking 

46 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

forward to peace in order to put the lesson 
to good effect. 

When I returned to the United States it 
seemed to me that our junkers had learned 
no lesson at all. One of them — ^high in the 
National Council of Defense, but in no way 
connected with the government — ^was pri- 
vately arguing in Washington that all the 
government's price-fixing had been a mis- 
take. "We would have had no trouble 
with the laboring-man," he said, "if we had 
let prices soar. He would have been so 
busy earning his daily bread that he'd have 
been willing to work eighteen hours a day." 
Another, a national figure in finance, was 
saying confidentially that President Wilson 
was not to be trusted. "He has too much 
sympathy with labor. So has the whole 
Democratic party." The Democratic junk- 
ers were as outspoken among themselves. 
They were preparing to elect a reactionary 
anti-Wilson Congress. And in Colorado 
they boasted of their success openly. Mr. 
Gerald Hughes, a Democratic leader in 
Colorado, celebrated the Republican vic- 
tory with Mr. Lawrence Phipps, the Re- 
publican Senator-elect from Colorado. 

Then came the armistice, and at once all 

4 47 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

pretense of fighting ''to make the world 
safe for democracy '* was abandoned by 
all our commercial junkers, who saw in the 
defeat of Germany only their opportunity 
to divide with our allies the trade empire 
of the world. Their representatives in the 
Senate promptly attacked all President Wil- 
son's peace terms. They denounced his 
League of Nations, by means of which Presi- 
dent Wilson wished to reconcile those con- 
flicting trade ambitions that have been 
"among the predetermining causes of war," 
as he has said. Our junkers wished no such 
settlement. They desired to share with the 
conquerors in a new exploitation of the needs 
of humanity. They had the support of the 
trade junkers of England, who again found 
their voices, and the men in France who saw 
only the opportunity to profit by Germany's 
commercial ruin, and the circles in Italy 
that were all for trade imperiahsm and the 
seizure of conquered territory. The whole 
junker press of the United States opened 
out in ridicule of the "absurd idealism" of 
President Wilson's program. And when 
he prepared to go to Europe in defense of 
that program every one of our junker repre- 
sentatives opposed and impeded him. 

48 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

He went. Our junkers pursued him with 
cries that he did not represent America, 
that no one in the United States wanted his 
absurd League of Nations, that Europe 
should not Usten to him. But Europe hs- 
tened. His reception by the people of 
France and England and Italy convinced 
the junkers of those countries that a junker 
peace would mean a popular revolution. 
He sat down to the peace-table with the 
masses of the European people at his back 
and the protests of our American junkers 
coming very faintly from a great distance. 

In the long fight that he has made in 
Paris he has been trying to translate into 
the clauses of the peace-treaty the tenets of 
the doughboy's religion and the principles 
of democratic liberty for which our dough- 
boys died. He has been opposed by every 
one in Europe who is of the junker faith. 
They have disguised their selfish class 
purposes as democratic aims, just as our 
junkers have disguised them here. They 
have stirred up every rancor of national 
hatred, every devil of national ambition, to 
further their own plans of imperialistic 
trade aggression and territorial grab. They 
have apparently been blocked by President 

49 



THE DOUGHBOY^S RELIGION 

Wilson, backed by Lloyd George and by the 
pressure of the mass of the people in the 
Allied countries whose silent hopes and pur- 
poses President Wilson has continued to 
voice. Thanks to him, the classes who 
suffer most by war have been represented — 
for the first time in the history of diplomacy 
— ^at the councils that determine the articles 
of peace. He has defeated the invisible gov- 
ernments and junker rule of Europe. 

It remains to be seen whether the heads 
and servitors of our invisible administration 
will try to maintain their undemocratic and 
junker policy in our domestic affairs. Will 
they continue to treat the labor problem as a 
servant problem? Will they continue to 
believe that the affairs of our great family, 
the nation, can be administered for money 
profit only, or wiU they learn that a home 
must be administered as a place of happi- 
ness and affection also, and the things that 
money cannot buy? Will they promote 
bolshevism and the tyranny of the lower 
floors over the upper, by insisting on junk- 
erism and the tyranny of the upper floors 
over the lower? WiU they welcome reform 
as it has been welcomed in England, or will 
they force revolution, as revolution has been 

50 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

forced in Russia and in Germany? Will 
they be converted to the liberality of the 
doughboy's religion, or will they continue 
their persecutions on behaK of the junker 
faith, and so set an example to their oppo- 
nents that may end by bringing a taste of 
class martyrdom to themselves? 



HORSES' RIGHTS FOR WOMEN 

WHEN you asked any one in Great 
Britain the secret of the strength 
which that country had shown in the 
war the answer was invariably one word — 
''Women." 

The British newspapers agreed, "It is our 
women who have made it possible for us to 
win the war, if we win it." One of the 
munitions manufacturers, when I com- 
mented upon the country's incredible out- 
put of war-material, replied, ''It has been 
done by our women." When I was amazed 
at the amount of food that was being pro- 
duced under the provisions for cultivating 
idle land, the government official explained, 
"That is due to the efforts of our women." 
And a report from the British Bureau of 
Information summed it all up, "But for 
the work of women, the wheels of industry 
could not have been kept in motion, nor 

52 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

could our armies have been maintained in 
the field." 

I was told that a million women had gone 
into farm-work, and instead of raising only 
20 per cent, of the farm-products that were 
consumed in the country, Great Britain was 
now raising 80 per cent. Nearly a million 
women were employed on munitions alone. 
The British were manufacturing as many 
heavy shells in four days as they had been 
turning out in a year when the war began; 
and a government report declared, "Nine- 
tenths of the whole manufacture of shells is 
now due to the labor of women." Another 
million were engaged in essential industries. 
Thousands were in service behind the 
British lines in France, and among them I 
saw many young girls driving officers' auto- 
mobiles under fire and along dangerous 
roads where a chauffeur needed the greatest 
skill and daring. ''They make daredevil 
chauffeurs," I was told. ''The best we 
have." 

Every one spoke of the courage of the 
women who were manufacturing high ex- 
plosives. When an accident turned one of 
their plants into a shambles those who es- 
caped returned to work smiling as hero- 

53 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

ically as the Tommies on their way back to 
the trenches. A Welsh girl in a London 
shell-factory had her hand caught in a ma- 
chine and all but torn from her wrist. She 
stood chatting to the men who were work- 
ing to release her mangled fingers. One of 
her girl friends asked, '' Doesn't it hurt?" 
and she whispered: ''It hurts all right. I 
just want to show them I'm Welsh." I saw 
girls who had lost an eye, a leg, or an arm 
in munition accidents. I saw many who 
had been scarred. They had to handle 
poisons that often ruined their complexions, 
destroyed their skins, or ''scalped" them, 
as the slang phrase was, by killing their 
hair, their eyelashes, and their eyebrows. 
They aU worked with a knowledge of the 
chances they were taking. I compHmented 
one of them on her bravery. "It's work 
that has to be done," she said. "We are 
all glad to be able to help." 

And every one was surprised by their 
skill and their endurance. It was found, 
officially, that a girl of eighteen was equal 
in intelligence and ability to an unskilled 
man of twenty-five, and that she was less 
liable to tire at "repetition work" than 
youths or unskilled men. They learned 

54 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

more rapidly than men. "After a few 
weeks, women on fitters' work were nearly 
as efficient as skilled men," a government 
report said, "and fitting is skilled engineer- 
ing." They were, for the most part, better 
than men in processes that required unusual 
nimbleness of hand and delicate sureness of 
touch. But their endurance was the great 
miracle. As blacksmiths' strikers, wielding 
seven-pound hammers j as truck-loaders 
handling boxes of ammunition weighing as 
much as a hundred and eighteen pounds; as 
excavators, with pick and shovel; as labor- 
ers in annealing furnaces — they did the heav- 
iest sort of work as well as the men had ever 
done it. And it was officially reported of a 
woman in the annealing furnace of a Glas- 
gow locomotive plant that "she seems to be 
heat-proof, and when men at another fur- 
nace have been seen to be fagged, she has 
gone to help them." 

All this will be no surprise to those who 
remember that in the early days of the 
human race all the industrial labor was done 
by women while their men hunted or fought. 
Among savage tribes to-day the woman is 
the worker. The endurance of peasant 
women is well known. And the surgeons 

55 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

tell us that any woman bears pain better 
than a man. 

What stuck in my thoughts was a wholly 
different matter. 

I had been at St. Dunstan's Hospital in 
London, where there were several hundred 
blind soldiers, and I found that nine-tenths 
of them had had opportunities to marry 
since they had lost their sight. The ma- 
ternal instinct in women took pity on them. 
There were plenty of charming and beauti- 
ful girls ready to help care for them for the 
rest of their lives. But the girls who had 
been scarred or maimed in the munitions- 
works — what of them? I asked a woman 
who was conducting us through one of these 
plants whether any of the wounded girls had 
ever received an offer of marriage after her 
accident. She replied: ''Not to my knowl- 
edge. No; not one." And as far as I 
could learn, what she said of this plant was 
true of all of them. 

That difference between the consequence 
of injury to men and to women in war- 
time stuck in my thoughts, as I say. It 
was not a difference for which the govern- 
ment or society or the state could be blamed. 
No; it was a difference due to human in- 

56 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

stincts and the laws of nature herself. It 
was nature's way of providing that man, the 
-hunter and fighter, might go out to defend 
the tribe with the assurance that his wounds 
would not be a bar to his mating when he 
returned. But it was also nature's way of 
making the woman keep her body out of 
danger, because her health and safety were 
of first importance to the future health and 
strength of the tribe. England was pouring 
out the lives of her men on the battle-front. 
That was terrible enough. But, on her 
home-front, in dangerous tasks and truly 
destructive labor, she was also pouring out 
the lives of her women. And that might 
prove fatal. 

The danger had been seen. The govern- 
ment had somewhat provided against it 
by regulating woman's work and the con- 
ditions of that work for her protection. 
The French government had gone further. 
In an attempt to provide for the future gen- 
eration, the mother was being cared for by 
the state before the birth of her child and 
during her convalescence. Similar laws 
were proposed in England. There was, of 
course, a general feeling that the war-time 
conditions were necessarily abnormal and 

57 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

unavoidable, though they were also con- 
sidered as merely temporary. But the 
more I saw of women in war-time the more 
I realized that these "abnormal conditions" 
were only an exaggeration of our ordinary 
peace-time conditions, and that the danger 
which was so obviously threatening the 
future of Great Britain, through the bodies 
of her women in war industries, was equally 
threatening her future and the future of 
America, through the bodies of women in 
the industries of peace. 

For example, take this matter of provid- 
ing for the care and support of mothers in 
order to assure the health and strength of 
the coming generation. Take, to be explicit, 
a case that I had in my court in Denver 
before the war — the case of Mrs. N . 

Her husband had worked in the smelters. 
He had been employed there for sixteen 
years from ten to twelve hours a day. 
Work in the smelters is a dangerous occupa- 
tion, and under our Colorado law he should 
not have been on duty more than eight 
hours a day; but, in order to evade the law, 
his employers had transferred the men in 
the smelters to the pay-roll of the railroad, 
where they might work twelve hours legally. 

58 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

At the end of a hard day a tired workman 
stumbled against a pail of water and upset 
it on a slag-pile. The slag exploded and 
killed Mr. N . The railroad company- 
paid Mrs. N two hundred and fifty 

dollars for the life of her husband, and that 
was the end of the first chapter. 

Mrs. N , with six young children, 

settled down in a little house by the rail- 
road tracks to a life of poverty and ill-paid 
labor. The children were allowed to run 
wild, because she could not look after them; 
she had to leave home to earn for them. 
They were continuously hungry, because 
she could not earn enough to feed them. 
Near the house, the railroad's box-cars were 
always standing as a temptation to mischief. 
Tommy, her eldest boy, broke into a box- 
car, one day, stole two dollars' worth of lead 
that had come from the smelter — the smel- 
ter where his father had been killed — sold it 
for sixty cents, and took the money to his 
mother. He was arrested and brought to 
the Juvenile Court. End of chapter two. 

The agents of our state Humane Society, 
so-called, here entered the case to report 

that they had investigated Mrs. N and 

found that she was ''bad." In an attempt 

59 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

to eke out her earnings she had taken a 
boarder in her little shack. In the course 
of time and temptation she had entered 
into relations with this boarder which the 
Humane Society described as "immoral.'' 
Therefore they proposed to take all her chil- 
dren away from her and put them in orphan- 
asylums, and leave her to complete her ruin. 

That is to say, society, having killed her 
husband by failing to enforce the laws for 
his protection, and having left her without 
the means to raise her six future citizens 
efficiently, and having forced her into the 
temptations of immorality in order to save 
them from starvation, and having de- 
bauched her boy Tommy in the same proc- 
ess of poverty — society now proposed to 
punish her and Tommy and all the other 
children for the acts and omissions of which 
society had been guilty. 

Our Juvenile Court, of course, does not 
see the responsibilities of society fulfilled in 
this way, and we did what we could to save 

Mrs. N and Tommy and her other little 

citizens from complete disaster. But, as a 
result of this and many similar cases, we 
lobbied the Colorado Legislature for a Moth- 
ers' Compensation Act that should allow 

60 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

us to pay such women as Mrs. N as 

much as fifty dollars a month to stay at 
home and rear their young families, so that 
these might be a profit to the state instead 
of a loss. It was peace-time. The war had 
not taught the world the value of mothers 
and children to the state. The Legislature 
would not act. 

In the mean time a Progressive campaign 
in Colorado won the initiative and referen- 
dum, by which the people themselves could 
initiate legislation. One of the first laws 
that we initiated was the Mothers' Com- 
pensation Act. But the law contained no 
appropriation of money to carry it out. In 
Denver we had to ask the city council for 
the money. We asked for an appropria- 
tion of five thousand doUars. 

That seemed little enough, but it was too 
much for a committee of business men from 
the Denver Chamber of Commerce, who 
came to the hearings on the city budget 
and objected to giving five thousand dollars 
to assist destitute mothers. They said it 
was ''paternalism," ''an encouragement to 
pauperism," "a fad," "the worst sort of 
socialism." They would have called it 
"bolshevism," but that word had not yet 

61 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

been initiated itself. They argued against 
any appropriation for mothers. 

While they were arguing I glanced down 
the budget and found an item reading, 
''For the Dog-catcher's Department, eight 
thousand dollars." I called their attention 
to this item. The city was providing eight 
thousand dollars for the purpose of seeing 
that the streets were not overrun with home- 
less, ill-bred, and dangerous dogs. It was, 
in effect, an appropriation to provide for a 
good breed of well-cared-for dogs by catch- 
ing and destroying all the poor mongrels for 
whom nobody would buy a tag. I pleaded 
for "dogs' rights for women. '^ If they 
could appropriate eight thousand dollars 
for the better breeding of dogs without being 
"paternalistic," couldn't they give five 
thousand dollars to insure a better breed 
of human beings? Would they do more for 
the offspring of a dog than for the children 
of a human mother? 

They decided that they could grant 
"dogs' rights for women," and the business 
men dropped their objection. After the 
hearing one of them came to me and said: 
"I was a fool to appear here, on this protest. 
I've never thought of these things at aU. 

62 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

You're right. I was only thinking of my 
taxes." 

The British had been taught by the war 
to think of something more than taxes. 
They had begun to think of the real values 
of their community life and of how to pro- 
tect men, women, and children from the 
industrial evils of peace as well as war, and 
of the means by which the nation could as- 
sure education, comfort, and happiness to 
all its citizens. They were campaigning 
for a number of bills — the Fisher Educa- 
tional bill, the Child-welfare bill, the Ma- 
ternity bill, and the bill establishing a Min- 
istry of Public Health. 

In the campaign for the Maternity bill, 
they ran against a sort of opposition which 
we had been fighting in Colorado. That 
was the opposition of the churches, the re- 
ligious, and all the most moral people of 
the community. They present a baffling 
problem in peace as in war. 

One of our greatest dij3iculties in the 
Juvenile Court had been to care for the 
young unmarried mothers who came before 
the court. They were not ''bad" girls. 
The bad ones knew how to avoid mother- 
hood. These were usually girls who had 

5 63 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

been betrayed by their own ignorance or 
innocence and the overpowering strength 
of natural instincts of which they had' not 
been properly warned. They were about 
to give birth to children under conditions 
of ostracism and shame that were sure to 
blight the lives of their infants and them- 
selves. That is to say, they were about to 
bring into the world future citizens who 
would surely be a liability to the state in- 
stead of an asset. We had no way in which 
we could provide them with the care and 
attention they needed, and no way to pro- 
tect them from the disgrace that was certain 
to destroy their social value to the state. 

Equally, we were unable to provide in ad- 
vance for the poverty-stricken young mother 
who abandoned her infant — ^because she 
foresaw no way of raising a child — and who 
was charged with a crime for deserting it. 
And, equally again, we had no way to help 
the poor mother who could not afford medi- 
cal attention in childbirth, who could not 
even remain away from her work long 
enough to regain her strength after the 
birth of her child — with disastrous results 
to both parent and offspring. 

One Sunday, after a week in which I had 

64 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

heard several such harrowing cases, my 
wife and I went motoring in the country. 
We passed the farm of a well-known stock- 
breeder, who hailed us and invited us in. 
He had a reputation all over the West for 
raising a very strong and enduring breed of 
horses; and in the West, where the horses 
have to climb hills and mountains, such a 
reputation must be well deserved. I asked 
him how he had won it. He replied, 
^'There's the reason in front of you," point- 
ing to a pasture in which a score of mares 
with their colts were browsing and feeding 
and playing about in the sunlight. ''We 
don't put the mothers at work for several 
months before and after foaling. We leave 
the colts with them as long as possible to 
feed. It makes all the difference between 
our horses and inferior stock." And when 
I thought of all those pathetic young 
mothers whose tales I had been hearing in 
court, I cried out in despair to myself, ''Why 
can't they have horses' rights?" 

So we began our slogan, "Horses' rights 
for women" in Colorado, and presented a 
bill in the Legislature providing that any 
woman who was about to become a mother 
might make a private application to our 

65 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

court and receive a sufficient maintenance 
for her to bear her child in circumstances of 
health and comfort that somewhat ap- 
proached the conditions enjoyed by my 
friend's horses on his stock-farm. When it 
was discovered that this bill included the 
relief of unmarried mothers, all argument 
was useless. I was '^ encouraging immoral- 
ity.'^ I was seriously regarded as a ques- 
tionable character. The bill never came 
anywhere near consideration by the Legislat- 
ure. It was damned in silence. The same 
bill is before the present Legislature, but its 
fate, for the same reasons, is still in doubt. 

The same pious horror at first greeted a 
similar attempt in England to help the 
mothers of illegitimate children there. ^ Yet 
the situation in London was appalling. The 
young man, facing the prospect of immi- 
nent death at the front, turned eagerly to 
any last pleasure that life had to offer. The 
young woman, pitiful with the sense that 
he was about to die in her defense, gave her- 
self to him. In London alone I was assured 
that there were eighty thousand young girls 

^England has recently passed the Maternity and Child- 
welfare bills, and Colorado has also just passed the first 
maternity law in this country. 

66 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

— ^not professional prostitutes — ^meeting the 
soldiers on the streets and love-making with 
them. Some of the military authorities put 
the figure as high as a hundred and fifty 
thousand. I heard it said in an address at 
a public meeting that two hundred thousand 
babies of unmarried mothers had been born 
in Great Britain during the year, but I was 
unable to verify the statistics. I was also 
unable to prove a statement that one-haK 
of these illegitimate children died in the first 
year of their lives. 

It was obvious, however, that here was 
an enormous waste of young men and young 
women and young children. What was 
society doing about it? Society was prose- 
cuting the young women and destroying the 
children. Faced with the terrific waste of 
life on the battle-field, nature was urging 
the youth of the nation to make up her 
losses, and society was blindly punishing 
them for yielding to her. The whole thing 
was criminally absurd. 

I went to some of the London courts to see 
the machinery of destruction in action. I 
found that the girls were brought in under 
a criminal charge, but there was no charge 
against the soldiers. The court procedure 

67 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

presupposed that all the girls were profes- 
sional prostitutes. It was impossible for 
the judge to talk privately with any of themj 
their ''constitutional rights " protected them 
from such an attempt to have them ''give 
evidence that might incriminate them." 
And even if the judge could have found out 
the truth from them, he could not act on it 
humanely without "compounding a felony." 
The girls were arraigned as enemies of 
society. The aim of the trial was to pro- 
tect society against them. And all this 
went on in spite of the fact that what was 
really needed was to protect them against 
society. 

Here again we were facing war-time con- 
ditions that were only an exaggeration of 
similar conditions prevailing in times of 
peace. In the Denver Juvenile Court we 
have a law by which such cases are tried 
under a chancery, not a criminal-court, 
jurisdiction. The young girl is brought in 
as a ward of the state, to be cared for and 
protected — not as an enemy of the state to 
be prosecuted. As a result of our methods, 
many of these girls have come to us seeking 
help or have been brought by others whom 
we have assisted. Out of our experience in 

68 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

such cases, I should say that the war-time 
conditions in London are not a great exag- 
geration of the ordinary conditions in any 
of our American industrial towns. Again 
anc} again in my court I have conducted 
long investigations into the moral condi- 
tions among girls in certain shops and fac- 
tories and industrial plants; and invariably 
I have found that what the girls themselves 
confidently assured me was probably true — 
that fifty per cent, of the working-girls were 
having sexual relations with young men, not 
professionally, but for the sake of automo- 
bile-rides and tickets to the theater and a 
*'good time" generally. The war had 
brought this sort of thing into the open, and 
of course increased it. The problem is the 
same old problem of youth and natural im- 
pulse and the desire for entertainment and 
excitement — the desire of the young to 
have some of the joys of life. The method 
of handling it in London, as here in America 
for the most part, was the same old stupid 
and blundering method of prosecuting the 
patient instead of treating the disease. 

Even in Colorado we have no effective 
way of forcing the young man in any of these 
cases to make reparation to the girl if he has 

69 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

wronged her, or to help support the child of 
which he is the father, or to help care for the 
girl if he has given her disease. We can 
attempt to punish him by bringing a crimi- 
nal case against him, but in a recent period 
of ten years only five hundred and twenty 
such cases were brought to our district 
attorney. After eliminating the cases that 
were not strong enough to take into court, 
a hundred and seventy-two out of the five 
hundred and twenty were filed; in these one 
hundred and seventy-two cases there were 
only twenty-two convictions, and of the 
twenty-two — ^what with appeals and other 
legal obstructions — there were only ten 
went to prison. That is to say, under the 
criminal procedure, ten men were punished 
in our county in ten years, and about one 
hundred and fifty girls were punished by 
the public exposure incident to a criminal 
trial. 

Criminal prosecution is a failure. Juries 
will not convict. The girls are unwilling to 
appear. The evidence is rarely conclusive. 
And sending the young man to the peniten- 
tiary is of little avail in any event. We are 
trying to get a law that shall permit the 
Colorado courts to hear these cases under a 

70 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

chancery jurisdiction, treating both par- 
ties as wards of the state, hearing the cases 
in private, as the evidence in many divorce 
suits is heard, and making a disposition of 
the case that shall be fair to the injured 
party and in the best interests of the state. 
Such a law would permit us to have the girl 
protected from ruinous publicity, to have 
her cared for in childbirth at the expense of 
the child's father, to have her treated at his 
expense if she were merely ill, and generally 
to rectify the wrong-doing of both parties 
and save them from social destruction in- 
stead of hastening them into it. 

And this brings me to another peace- 
time problem which the war has made only 
too manifest — the problem of venereal dis- 
ease. It was handled in the army with the 
greatest intelligence. The men were given 
lectures and instructions in its dangers and 
taught how to avoid them. They were 
compelled to take injections to keep them 
immune and to use prophylactics. The 
latter were given out to them by the thou- 
sands. And, as a result, the percentage of 
venereal disease among the men of the 
American Expeditionary Force was the 
lowest in the history of war. 

71 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

But, by comparison, little was done to 
protect the young women. They were left 
generally at the mercy of their ignorance. 
Yet venereal disease among women is more 
destructive to the future of society than it 
is among men, because it ordinarily renders 
the woman incapable of bearing children. 
And what was happening in England and 
France and Italy was a protection to men 
and a progressive sterilization of women. 

Here again, society, in the face of the 
enormous loss of life in war, was merely 
committing suicide. It has been doing the 
same thing in the recent years of peace. 
By failure to protect women in industry and 
in the new conditions of life under our pres- 
ent industrial regime, society has been de- 
stroying future generations by negtecting 
the mothers of to-morrow. Our laws and 
our governments have been busily protect- 
ing only property rights, although the war 
has shown that not property, but men and 
women, are the valuable assets of a nation, 
and that, of the two, the women are the 
more valuable and the least conserved. 
Our reconstructed world will have to look 
to that. We shall have to see to it that 
women have not merely ''dogs' rights" or 

72 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

''horses^ rights/' but human rights. And 
America will have to do it, as the nations 
of Europe are learning to do it, or America 
will be hopelessly defeated in the competi- 
tions of peace that are now beginning. It 
was the women of Great Britain and France 
who made it possible for the Allies to win 
the war. Properly protected and conserved, 
the woman power of those nations will so 
add to their public health and strength and 
happiness that America will not be able to 
live in the same world with them unless 
America undertakes equal measures of in- 
dustrial reform and social improvement. 



A LEAGUE OF UNDERSTANDING 

THE war with Germany has changed 
many things, but it has changed noth- 
ing so much as it has changed war itseK. 
Modern war is a war of machinery. No 
nation can now hope to make war success- 
fully unless it is a nation rich in mines and 
factories and munition-works and highly 
technical industrial processes and a large 
body of skilled workmen. It follows, there- 
fore, that, with Germany defeated and pay- 
ing tribute, the peace of the world is in the 
hands of the three great industrial nations, 
Britain, France, and the United States. An 
alliance of those nations can make war hope- 
less for any other nation or group of nations 
in the world. With Belgium and Italy and 
Japan added to such a league, the remaining 
peoples of Europe and Asia, however brave, 
are as helpless as men with bows and arrows 
fighting machine-guns and airplanes and 
armored tanks. 

74 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Peace, then — ^the peace of the world — is 
an affair of friendship and sympathetic 
understanding between the French, the 
British, and ourselves. The French have 
always had our admiration and affection. 
"The good American, when he dies, goes to 
Paris.'^ But the British, until we joined in 
the war, neither had our friendship nor 
seemed to desire it. They appeared to see 
nothing in us but our faults, and we noth- 
ing in them but theirs. A war between us 
was unthinkable, but it was scarcely more 
incredible than an alliance. We had the 
sort of humorous aversion for one another 
that is more difficult to overcome than 
enmity. What was the cause of it? Has 
it been cured? Has it passed permanently, 
or will it return with the less, heroic moods 
and the more selfish rivalries of peace? 

I must admit that, although all my fore- 
bears came from the British Isles, I used to 
disJike the English. Our school histories, 
with their nonsense about the War of In- 
dependence, may have given me the bias, 
but it was the traveling Englishman who 
confirmed me in it. I attempted once to 
start up a conversation with him in a smok- 
ing-car, in our informal Western fashion, 

75 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

and he behaved as if I were a card-sharp 
trying to inveigle him into a game. I 
imagine it is this appearance of silent hos- 
tility to the stranger that is most to blame 
for the Englishman's unpopularity among 
foreigners. We do not understand that the 
Englishman does not behave so with out- 
landers only. He behaves in exactly the 
same way with strange Englishmen. It is 
a convention among the conventional Eng- 
lish that they cannot speak until they have 
been introduced. Many of them make fun 
of it themselves. One of the wittiest of 
Gilbert's "Bab Ballads" relates the ad- 
ventures of two Englishmen, cast away on 
a desert island, who lived on opposite 
shores of it without speaking, for years, 
until an accident disclosed that one of 
them had a letter of introduction to the 
other. 

But if you come to an Englishman with 
such a letter, nothing could be heartier than 
his hospitality. He is much more sensible 
of his obligations as a host than we Ameri- 
cans. He is more careful about who shall 
enter his home, but he is correspondingly 
more sincere in his welcome when he gives 
it. It does not follow that he is cold or 

76 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

snobbish simply because he takes seriously 
our own accepted English doctrine that 
every man's home is his castle and that it 
should be free from invasion at the mere 
invitation of the intruder. I found the 
conventional Englishman — once you had 
passed the outer wall of his conventions — • 
the most approachable, simple, and demo- 
cratic person to be imagined. 

Again and again they told me that one 
of their obvious traits before the war was a 
smug indifference as to whether we Ameri- 
cans understood them or not, although they 
admitted at the same time that they had 
found the average American eager to under- 
stand them and to be understood by them. 
If that was their attitude before the war, 
they have changed. I found the normal 
Britisher just as anxious to be understood 
as the American. He wants our friend- 
ship. He is constantly apologizing for the 
stupidity of that German sovereign, George 
III, whose pigheadedness forced the revolt 
of the British in the American colonies in 
'76; and he is constantly explaining that 
the freedom of the seK-governing nations 
of the British Empire has been the result 
of the lesson which the English learned from 

77 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

our War of Independence. He does not 
see why the modern American should feel 
any animosity to the British for a conflict 
in which the Americans won and for which 
the British people were not responsible. I 
confess that I could only answer that the 
animosity was a bad tradition with us, and 
unreasonable. 

I was standing, one morning, on the deck 
of a liner, among a number of British offi- 
cers, watching the arrival of a fleet of Ameri- 
can transports in an English harbor. Some 
fifteen great ships steamed past us, loaded 
to the gunwales with our doughboys. They 
were hanging over the rail, clinging to the 
rigging, perched on ventilators, and swarm- 
ing in the crow's-nest; and all were shout- 
ing, cheering, whistling, singing, and waving 
their hats together in a mad pandemonium 
of high spirits at reaching the sight of land. 
The British in our group looked at the scene 
in polite amazement, silently. In the midst 
of it all one of them who was near me said 
to his companion, in a low voice, ''What an 
extr'ordinary waste of energy !'' 

And that is another of the English con- 
ventions that make him unsjrmpathetic to 
the foreigner. The conventional English- 

78 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

man is the most repressed of civilized men. 
He appears to live in a constant horror of 
"giving himself away." It is as if he re- 
garded a display of emotion as a sort of in- 
decent exposure, a kind of spiritual naked- 
ness. He wraps himself in silence and 
reserve like a nun in her habit. Where he 
came by this tradition of the American In- 
dian I do not know, but it seems impossible 
now that he should ever change it. It has 
become an affair of "good form.'' It is a 
fearful handicap in his relations with the 
rest of the world, for it leaves him liable to 
all the misunderstandings that come of in- 
expressiveness. It makes him appear criti- 
cal and superior in the midst of an alien en- 
thusiasm. It deprives him of many of the 
social graces that foUow an easy flow of 
spirit. And it seems to me to leave him 
less mental energy than he ought to have — 
for it takes energy to repress emotion, and 
the muffler on the explosive engine reduces 
the power. It would help him pick up his 
speed more quickly if he would run with his 
cut-out open when he is taking a hill. 

We journeyed to London with some 
American officers whom we met a few days 
later in Piccadilly. One of them said: 

6 79 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

"I have been all over this darn town and 
I haven't seen an American flag yet. I 
heard the British didn't like us, and now I 
know it. Just look at old New York — ^from 
the Battery to Harlem, you can see British 
flags everywhere." 

"But," I replied, "neither have I seen a 
French flag nor an Italian flag nor a Belgian 
■ — ^why, I haven't seen a British flag!" 

"By jingo, that's right!" chimed in the 
other ofiicer. "What's the matter with 
these Britishers — don't they know there's a 
war?" 

"WeU," I answered, "if anybody in 
Europe ought to know, it certainly is Eng- 
land. I haven't met any one here who 
hasn't suffered bitterly — ^who hasn't lost a 
son, a brother, a husband, or a father." 

"You would never know it, would you?" 
queried another. 

"No," I replied; "not if you had to find 
it out from them or from service-flags." 

They serve without flags in England, 
without ostentation. They sacrifice with- 
out fuss and hide their sorrow. This habit 
has one great virtue — it does not distract 
from the grim business in hand. The na- 
tion goes ahead, without a whimper, through 

80 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

the worst disasters. And as a nation they 
can 'Hake more punishment" than any 
other people in the modern world. They 
are the most stubborn of fighters. They 
never know when they are beaten, as Na- 
poleon complained. They say of them- 
selves that they "never win any battle but 
the final one." They "muddle through" 
buUheadedly, silently enduring reverses 
that would break the hearts of most of us, 
and crushing their opponents at last by 
mere staying-power. By the same token, 
their very silence makes it possible for stu- 
pidity to persist in high places longer than 
it could with us, and they bring some of 
their disasters on themselves by accepting 
blunders in leadership as one of the inevi- 
table evils that must be endured by a game 
spirit. 

Altogether, I should say, they are less 
"affectable" than we are. They are less 
responsive. They are less easily aroused. 
They have ordinarily less enthusiasm to sup- 
press and therefore, naturally, make a virtue 
of their failure to express it. It may be, at 
bottom, a matter of their climate, whi-ch is 
far from invigorating and calls for frequent 
stimulants. Even the foreigner finds it 

81 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

difficult to "carry on" through an English 
afternoon, in the brightest weather, without 
his afternoon tea. For the native, tea is 
served even at the matinees in the theaters, 
between the acts, and sold to the audience 
in their seats, like our "pop" at a ball game. 
This greater stolidity of the English 
makes them critical of our national volu- 
bihty. We went at the war in a loud rage, 
rolling up our sleeves with eloquence, shak- 
ing our oratorical fists, smacking the earth 
with the flat of the national foot, and calling 
out to the enemy that we were going to 
wipe up the world with him. "These 
Americans," a newspaper commented after 
Chateau-Thierry, "are as good as they said 
they were. They could not be better." I 
heard a loud-mouthed American Heutenant 
telling a lot of Tommies, "You fellows have 
been at this job for four years, and now we 
have come over here to finish it up for you." 
This sort of bluster seemed to me partly a 
mischievous attempt to get a rise out of the 
silent Britisher and partly our way of com- 
mitting ourselves before the world to a 
rather frightening task. Our soldiers had 
very little of it. The average doughboy 
was touchingly modest and boyish. One 

82 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

English officer said to me: ''They have 
plenty of ginger and no brag. They are 
active, quick, and clever. We like them be- 
cause they are all that could be expected of 
gentlemen and soldiers." They tore into 
battle like young hounds, peeling off their 
coats and fairly rushing the Germans off 
their feet. They suffered shockingly in 
casualties, but the very whoop and fury of 
their attack was a stimulant to the whole 
Allied Hne. It was a moment when enthu- 
siasm was needed and high spirits helped. 

Our blustering self-assertion is the prod- 
uct of our national isolation. We have 
been the big frog in our pond, but it has 
been a pond remote from Europe. The 
nations there knew little of us and cared 
less. We made the mistake of trying to 
tell them what a mighty frog we were, and 
it bored them. In the same way the Brit- 
ish insularity and the "splendid isolation" 
of which they were so proud made them no 
less conceited than we, but made that con- 
ceit silently indifferent to the opinion of the 
rest of the world. Europe knew of them 
and their achievements, their empire and 
their wealth. They did not need to boast. 
Their silent self-assurance did it for them. 

83 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Both our isolation and Great Britain's 
have been ended by the war. The air- 
plane and the submarine have made isola- 
tion impossible. No nation can any longer 
be indifferent to friendship or hostihty. 
And in a world that will watch our actions 
and judge us by them we shall have less 
temptation to talk about ourselves. Our 
national faults and the characteristics that 
have made us peevish with the British seem 
in a fair way to be cured by the one circum- 
stance — that we find each other suddenly 
near neighbors who wish to be amiable and 
understood. 

It should be easy. Whatever our tem- 
peramental differences, as nations we have 
the same ideals. We seek the same goal. 
We believe in the same sort of freedom, the 
same rights for the common man. We 
have the same tolerant wish to live and let 
live. We are neither of us absurd about 
military glory, are not out for conquest or 
dominion, and have no desire to rule any 
country that will rule itself in such a man- 
ner as not to upset the peace of the world. 
The way in which we Americans settled our 
affairs with Cuba was not more unselfish 
than the way in which the British made the 

84 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

Boer Republic a self-governing nation as 
soon as peace was signed in South Africa. 
The British have problems in Egypt and 
India, as we have them in the Philippines, 
but the will to get free of those problems is 
not lacking in the ordinary Britisher any 
more than it is in us. 

An alliance of the British, the French, 
and ourselves is a league of the three great 
modern democracies — ^for the British Em- 
pire is as much a republic as the United 
States. They have a curious trick in Brit- 
ain of reforming the spirit of an institution 
without changing its outer shape, and the 
King of England has about as much royal 
power as our Vice-President. All the au- 
thority of the House of Lords was recently 
abolished, but the peers continue to sit and 
argue. The self-governing colonies of the 
Empire are wholly self-governing and in- 
dependent within the limits of their own 
loyalty, yet Canada is still spoken of as the 
Dominion of Canada. There is some in- 
stinct in the British that makes them treas- 
ure old buildings, old customs, old forms, 
and old institutions much more than we. 
The undisturbed continuity of the national 
life on their sheltered island may have bred 

85 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

the habit in them. When a reform becomes 
necessary they make it, but they preserve 
the appearance of not having made it. 
This, I think, is the essence of what they 
call their "national genius for compromise." 
It is rather a joke — except when it deceives 
the foreigner who sometimes does not see 
below the outward show. 

I should say that the one striking differ- 
ence between our two forms of democracy 
lies in the more ordered system of social 
classes in England and the absence of any 
such distinctions among us, except those 
that come of differences in wealth. The 
English system still preserves many of the 
aspects of its feudal past. Families have 
remained for generations as servants, or 
tradesmen, or lawyers, or landed gentry, or 
titled aristocrats. But within that set 
form there is a continual change of individ- 
ual fortunes. It is almost as easy for talent 
to rise to the top in England as here. The 
titles are largely new. The government 
heads are of all ranks of origin. Wealth in- 
evitably gets power and position, as it does 
with us, and ability commands prestige. 

But with titles and positions recognized 
and class distinctions set, the ordinary Eng- 

86 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

lishman is easily known for what he really 
is, and he is aware of it. He has less temp- 
tation to self-assertion. He relies less on 
his personality than we do, and seems less 
interested in it. He has more repose — 
whether it be the repose of humility in the 
lower classes or of complacency in the upper. 
He talks less about himself, his experiences, 
his peculiarities. He seems consequently 
less egotistic, but more self-assured. We 
are likely to misunderstand that in him. 

He, for his part, is certain to make the 
mistake of thinking us money-mad. As a 
matter of fact, we are much freer with our 
money than he, because to be free with 
money is a distinction among us. It is the 
mark of the millionaire, and to be a million- 
aire in America is to have the only aristo- 
cratic privileges and powers that we permit. 
The Englishman and the Frenchman find 
it more difficult to come by money than we 
do. They are thrifty by necessity. They 
think about their expenditures more than 
we do. They are likely to be " meaner about 
money." And there are aristocrats in both 
France and England who, as we say, are 
"willing to do anything for money except 
work for it." At the same time, the fact 

87 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

that there are so many other values in their 
lives besides money values keeps all their 
arts and professions less commercial than 
ours and makes it impossible for the trading 
and financial classes to dominate the gov- 
ernment as completely as ours do. 

For that reason the af ter-the-war reforms, 
the new labor legislation, and the changes in 
the social order which the British Labor 
party is proposing, are more easy to effect 
than they would be with us. The govern- 
ing Englishman has a sense of responsibility 
to the whole nation that makes him more 
impartial in the disputes between capital 
and labor. I found it, for example, diffi- 
cult to make Mr. Lloyd George understand 
the power of corrupt corporations among us, 
though he knew of it and asked curiously 
about it. He did not see how this power 
could be imposed on the professional men, 
the lawyers, the teachers, the writers, the 
preachers, and the small business men, who 
would be opposed to it in England. In the 
same way it was difficult to explain why so 
many of our largest newspapers were op- 
posed to President Wilson's peace policies 
and spoke only for our commercial junkers. 

It is this very difference between the Eng- 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

lish government and ours that will make a 
nearer neighborliness valuable to us. Re- 
forms there will encourage reforms here, 
and offset our danger of a blind revolution 
patterned after the Russian model. Our 
radicals have lost patience with the slow 
struggle against the corrupt control of legis- 
lation. The bolshevists among us have 
money from Russia and encouragement 
from Germany — for, in the prospect of in- 
dustrial disorders elsewhere, the German 
commercial junkers see a hope of re-estab- 
lishing their own fortunes. The British are 
forestalling industrial unrest by removing 
the causes of it. We shall have to do the 
same, if we are to avoid a national disaster. 
All the German influences and a great 
many other influences in this disordered 
world will be opposed to a friendly under- 
standing between us and the British, but 
it is not the knaves whom we have most to 
fear — it is the fools. No one would ap- 
plaud a man who declared that he was the 
wisest, the most powerful, the most unself- 
ish and the freest of mankind. But, if he 
extends his ego to a nation and boasts of 
himself, by proxy, in his praises of his 
country, his egotism is permitted to vaunt 

89 



THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION 

itself as patriotism and he helps to set a 
whole world by the ears. This sort of 
patriotism is an exercise for maniacs. It 
is, indeed, a kind of sublimated megalo- 
mania for which the League of Nations might 
well provide a lunatic asylum at Geneva. 
America has as many of these extended ego- 
ists as England has or France. They are 
more dangerous than our enemies. Their 
folly is more to be dreaded than spite. "I 
prefer the wicked to the foolish," the French 
wit said. "The wicked sometimes tire." 



THE END 



FEB 2 1920 



